British Museum to feature Australia’s Aboriginal masters

PanARMENIAN.Net - The British Museum offers an unprecedented opportunity to see its Australian collection. Astonishingly, only two of the museum’s 6,000 Australian objects are normally on display: a shield acquired by Captain James Cook in 1770, and a modern Aboriginal memorial pole. Other objects brought back from early encounters with indigenous Australians are also in store, The Art Newspaper reports.

The exhibition will present 180 objects, all but 20 of which are from the British Museum’s collection. Of the loans, eight are from the National Museum of Australia. Among the more unexpected lenders is Marylebone Cricket Club, which is loaning a wooden club donated by an Aboriginal member of the first Australian cricket team to tour England, in 1868.

This is the first major show in the UK to present a history of indigenous Australia, with works made by the country’s Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. Although London’s Royal Academy of Arts held an Australian show in 2013, it focused on fine art, and less than a third of the exhibits were by indigenous artists.

Two shields from the British Museum collection with particularly interesting stories will be shown. The first is the one acquired by Cook at Botany Bay. It was assumed to have been made from eucalyptus, but recent research has revealed it to be red mangrove, which only grew 500km to the north of Botany Bay. This suggests the existence of previously unknown Aboriginal trading links over this vast distance. Another shield was made in Melbourne’s prison by Peter Mungett, an Aboriginal who in 1859 refused to testify in a rape case because he did not regard himself as a British citizen (his death sentence was commuted to imprisonment).

The British Museum exhibition is particularly important because it is being organised in collaboration with Australian institutions and with the co-operation of the Aboriginal community and Torres Strait Islanders. The National Museum of Australia in Canberra will later be showing a different version of the show, entitled “Encounters” (November 26 - March 28, 2016). That exhibition will include 85 contemporary objects in the Canberra collection, along with 150 loans from the British Museum. Most of the objects from London will be returning to Australia for the first time since they left, representing an emotional moment for many Australians.